Amen to that. All these Apple fanboys don't realize that they're actually Apple's worst enemy... their endless and often misguided evangelism of Apple's products probably turns more people off Apple than anything else. No doubt that Apple has some innovative products, but they most certainly do not have a monopoly on innovation. Furthermore, Apple also tends suffer from the 'Not Invented Here Syndrome' which often limits the potential of their cool products. Latest example of this boneheaded mentality is their censorship of applications which can be offered through the App Store.
Ummm... W580i doesn't use MicroSD, but rather Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Micro (M2). Those are always going to be significantly more expensive than MicroSD, due to lower volume. For example, I just recently picked up three 4GB MicroSD cards from Woot! for $5.99 each.
LOL... sorry, I misread your post... thought you said that Rush were irrelevant, hence my sarcastic reply about their #3 Billboard position this week. Anyway, I agree with you about Poison et. al. "Nothin' but a good time!"
...who calls Rush "the big hair, fake falsetto heavy metal group that made the 1980s so irrelevant musically" and casts them in the same league as Poison and Journey. I'm not even going to bother to explain the utter absurdity of such an idiotic statement.
Needless to say, someone as uninformed as this moron doesn't deserve much credibility, even when reporting on a fluff subject like 'entertainment news.' Then again, one can see why they would have him cover the red carpet instead of real news.
I also know the email is most likely legit because it was sent to a very specific email address that only Vonage knows and uses (I create a new email alias for each company I deal with. That way I can delete that email address if it gets abused by that company
I do the same thing, and my IPO email also came to my vonage specific email address, and I also received the message in my Vonage voice mail box. All these people on here calling this a phishing scam need to take off their tin foil hat for a minute and take a deep breath. Unquestionably, it's a good thing to be vigilant against email scams, but some of the messages here on/. are bordering extreme paranoia.
That said, while this IPO offer is legitimate, some of the concerns expressed here about the financial viability are also legitimate. It is very true that Vonage spends disproportionate amounts of money on marketing, even though it is for a very good reason. It's not unlike what amazon.com was doing in their early days... loss-leader sales in order to get their name to be nearly synonymous with online shopping. Today, they're a Fortune 500 company.
There's inherent risk in investing, but the rewards can be well worth it. Do your research and weigh the risks.
That article reads like fodder for conspiracy theorists. It presents four pieces of circumstantial evidence and concludes that based on those, Apple must be planning to switch to Windows. I suppose that could be a plausible scenario in a galaxy far, far away, but in modern, commodity driven computer industry here on Earth, I believe the explanation is far simpler.
Could it be that Apple management is simply being pragmatic, and accepting the fact x86 hardware is cheaper and advancing at faster rate, and that USB 2.0 simply removed any competetive advantage that Firewire might have had in the past, and is present on far more hardware than 1394 is? Naw, it can't be that... it must be that they're planning to dump their most cherished asset, one that sets them apart from the rest of the computer manufacturers, defines the core of Apple's product line, and keeps their customers in fold with nearly religious fervor. Yeah, that must be it!
But let me ask you this. Does your Rio Karma support anything analogous to iTunes' Smart Playlists (playlists that update on the fly based on arbitrary logical rules)? Does it automatically sync with your music library when connected to the computer, or do you have to manually drag files around? Does it update metadata on a per-song basis like "last played time" and "play count" every time you play a song? Does it play AAC?
In case you really are curious about this rather than just posing a rhetorical question, I'll answer this. Obviously the feature set won't be identical to iPod, but yes, there are analogous features. Dynamic playlists based on user selected criteria (such as "Entertain Me", "Sounds of 70's/80's/90's/etc...", "Forgotten Gems", "Newest Tracks", etc...), on the fly playlists editable by the user while the player is playing, the player does sync up with my PC automatically (in place of iTunes, there's the Rio Music Manager), and yes, it does use metadata like last played time and play count. It uses that data for the above mentioned playlist functionalities. Obviously, AAC is not supported, as I'm not aware of any other player on the market besides the iPod that actually does support that format. (There may well be, I'm just not aware of one.)
The gaps annoy me enough that I've been searching for a replacement. I have no loyalty to Apple, but I won't give up the rest of the excellent experience.
Gapless playback was the other absolute must-have for me, and the main reason why I went with the Karma. Once I got the player, I quickly learned that it's no slouch when it comes to track management, thanks to the features I mentioned above. Now, I'm not saying that the Karma is perfect, but it's pretty darn excellent. Probably the main flaw is the rather flakey Hitachi hard drive which tends to lock up when the player is shaken too hard, requiring the press of the hard reset button. This has been the number 1 complaint about the player, and the main reason why many online stores had some negative feedback for the player. My own experience has been that if I don't go jogging with it, it's perfectly solid. I use it at the office quite a bit, and I've taken the player with me everywhere I travel, and haven't had many problems in the year and a half that I've owned it. The 14 hour battery life is pretty nice as well.
Most of this discussion is somewhat moot at this point anyway, because the Karma has been discontinued, even though it's still available through some retailers. I've been quite dismayed at the fact that there is still no replacement that matches the feature set of this player currently on the market. I'd really like to upgrade to something that can do everything that the Karma can, but has higher storage capacity, is a bit more rugged, and perhaps has a nicer display (i.e. color). I'm hopeful that such a player will be coming in not too distant future, because the engineering team that developed the Karma firmare now works for SigmaTel, and a message posted on www.dapreview.net suggests that they have already implemented the full Karma functionality in the reference design for their new chipset.
As far as playing obscure file formats, yes they do have enough power. But you know what? No-one cares. Really. No-one.
Hmmm.... I suppose that because you don't care, you think that everyone else feels the same way. I for one agree with the previous poster about the Vorbis support. It's the number one reason why I opted for a different audio player (Rio Karma in my case) than the iPod.
I would have gladly purchased Apple's player, if it would play my music library. I went through the process of encoding over 5,000 tracks from my CD library, and they're all in OGG/Vorbis, and they play fine on my Windows XP notebook, my MythTV HTPC, my Rio Karma, my Linux server, but they do NOT play on the Apple iPod. You may make yourself feel better about the iPod limitations by dismissing this 'obscure format' as you put it, but that doesn't change the fact that Apple's player doesn't support it, and other, more functional players do.
So, you see, there are people out here that DO care. Really. There are. I'm one of them, and gave my $300 to a different company that delivered a product that delivers much better functionality for my needs.
p.s. Do you have any live albums on your iPod? How do you like those gaps of silence between each track?;-)
Nope. Only Fox and ABC use the 720p format natively. NBC, CBS, PBS, WB, UPN all use 1080i. Dish Network and DirecTV also utilize 1080i, but that doesn't matter in context of MythTV anyway, since there aren't any (legitimate*) satellite cards for receiving sat programming on computers. Incidentally, our local ABC affiliate WFAA in Dallas/Fort Worth upconverts their 720p network programs and broadcasts 1080i, leaving the Fox station as the only one in our broadcast area that actually uses 720p.
By the way, what you heard about signal degradation reducing DishNet 1080i quality to lower resolution doesn't make much sense. It's 1920x1080 interlaced MPEG digital video stream so it either will have full resolution or you won't have any picture at all. Now, Echostar may be applying some filters to the video before they uplink it, but there certainly won't be any quality lost beyond that as a consequence of signal degradation, and the bitstream will still be full 1080i resolution.
Anyway, one thing I know for sure is that my HD package from DishNet looks very good. (especially Monday nights on HDNet.;-) )
* - It is possible to receive Dish Network with appropriately configured DVB-S card and smart card emulator, but that puts any US citizen in violation of the DMCA.
If you actually want to have high fidelity reproduction of sound in rooms other than the one that houses your audio system, your only real choice is to run cable. There are some wireless speaker rigs that operate at 900MHz or 2.4GHz, but by the very nature of their design, they are very band limited, and have an onboard amplifier that always has an absolutely horrible harmonic distortion rating (I've seen it as bad as 10% THD). Another words, they sound like crap. If your house is being built, then I would suggest (as others have here) to go buy a spool of speaker cable (and no, it doesn't have to be Monster Cable, any decent copper conductor will do), and run some additional speaker lines in the walls. Even if you don't use them initially, they'll be there when you need them. This is what I did when I had my house built a couple of years ago, and my only regret is that I didn't run even more cable.
Wireless is great for digital data transmission, but not for hifi audio.
What you state is all true, however the player's integrated headphone amp also affects the sound quality, at least for playback through headphones.
I've read plenty of anecdotal evidence on the various internet message boards suggesting that the Karma indeed does sound better than an iPod when compared side by side, using a same audio file and same set of headphones. Personally, I attributed this perceived difference to the quality of the phone amp in each unit. It's entirely possible that the Karma amp drives the phones with a bit more power, which would tend to make the sound more dynamic.
a bill which restricts the ability of some institutions to mention a candidate by name within 60 days of a general election, and 30 days of a primary. How is this *not* a violation of the 1st Amendment?
Well, since you asked, it's not a violation because the first amendment protects individual rights, not rights of organizations. Organizations don't have the right to vote, citizens do. There is plenty of civil liberty encroachments to be angry about that our government has passed in the recent years, but the McCain-Feingold bill is not one of them. In fact, it's sole purpose is to try to limit the influence of special interest groups and PAC's on the outcome of our elections, which is a very honorable thing to do, IMHO.
'cept that Matt didn't really have much (anything?) to do with ixemul.library (if my memory serves me correctly). I believe it was Markus Wild, the same guy who later single-handedly ported NetBSD to the Amiga.
On the other hand, Matt wrote the most excellent DICE C compiler, which I purchased from him back in the day, and own it to this day. Overall, I think it was a better development environment that the ol' SAS C that CBM standardized on. The price was also much better for a starving college student that I was.
Not that any of this has anything to do with DragonFly BSD, however as an old Amigan myself, I can unequivocally state that Matt was definately considered an uber-hacker in the community. DNet anyone?
Behold my felow Commie brethren! The chicken lips live! Err, sorry, I know this post doesn't have anything substantial to say, but as someone who cut their teeth in the world of computing through the ranks of VIC-20, C64, Amiga 500, and finally Amiga 3000 users, it gave me warm fuzzies seeing the ol' Commodore logo on a product once again. Having been a die-hard Amiga enthusiast (read: fanatic) and hating the original company's aptitude for clutching defeat out of the jaws of victory, it's nonethess nice to see the name resurrected, even if it has nothing to do with the original ]()()L machines of the 80's and early 90's. (hmmm, wonder if the new mp3 players support custom Copper lists!?)
You know, some of us Americans are using P900's as well. I sure love mine.;-) The mobile phone sophistication gap that used to exist between Europe and the US has largely been removed in the past couple of years, since GSM has become very wide spread standard on this side of the Atlantic. This has been driven largely by the fact that mobile providers who used to be TDMA based have switched over to GSM.
Kudos to Rio for making a player you are happy with, but in general these companies are going to go for money and widespread adoption, and that probably means embracing the proprietary codecs.
Your point is well taken, but there's no reason why they couldn't support proprietary and open standards. The Rio player supports the DRM laden WMA format as well as MP3 and the lossless, free FLAC in addition to Ogg Vorbis. I think that is a successful formula, and it will sell them a few more players, because people who care about this kind of stuff will specifically seek out the hardware that supports the alternative codecs.
This would be interesting to me if it supported Ogg/Vorbis/Theora. I just bought the fantastic Rio Karma digital music player, and I chose it over the other offerings, specifically because it supports Ogg Vorbis. I'm in the process of encoding my entire CD collection in this format, for both quality and philosophical reasons. Besides the Rio, there are two other HD based players that support Ogg/Vorbis, the iRiver H120 and the Neuros but I went with the Karma mostly because it's the smallest of the three, the price was right, and the sound is excellent.
....which, of course, transcoded back from cyrilic alphabet spells SSSR, as in "Soyuz Sovietkieh Sosialistiskieh Respubliks* " meaning Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But why does that matter anyway.:-)
* - err, it's kind of difficult to phoniticize russian language in english
Oh yeah! This discussion brings back memories. I was also one of the die-hard Commodore computer geeks. Started out with a VIC-20 and its incredible 22 column display. I even had a 24K memory expander for that bad boy, which made it much more useful, but also incompatible with many VIC programs due to where the added memory mapped itself.
Then I graduated to the Commodore 64 and its 40 column display and all that memory really opened up the possibilities! Only problem was that damn cassette tape drive. It was painful waiting for Telengard to load up from a tape. Eventually, I upgraded to the 1541 floppy drive, and things got really 'fast.' (Anyone who ever had the 1541 will see the irony in that!) It's a good thing Fast Hack'em came along! C= 64 was also when I got my first modem, a blazing fast 300 baud monster called the Vicmodem, and I proceeded to become a BBS addict. From the Vicmodem I upgraded to a real autodial, but still 300 baud modem, and then finally a 1200 baud screamer.
Then toward the end of the 80's, by which time I'd already become a Unix geek thanks to Explorers post at the local AT&T manufacturing plant, I outgrew the trusty 64, and borrowed money to get an Amiga 500 system. Anyone who ever owned one of those machines will understand what kind of feeling of superiority it invoked in its owners, and at the time, those feelings were justified. Here was a machine with a super efficient Unix-like operating system featuring true pre-emptive multistasking, 4 channel digital audio, 4096 colors, hardware asssisted graphics rendering including a very first blitter in any computer. That machine just killed anything else on ther market from a technical standpoint. The A500 served me well for a couple of years, however once I got it expanded beyond all reasonable bounds, it became clear that it was time to graduate to the big leagues. Once again, I borrowed a large chunk of change (for a junior in college), and I upgraded to the Amiga 3000/25. This box was once again revolutionary, in that it was the first ever fully 32 bit personal computer to hit the market. I think I still have the Byte magazine issue, where they featured it on the cover. The A3000 finally allowed me to run Unix at home, thanks to the efforts of Markus Wild from Switzerland, who singlehandedly ported NetBSD to the Amiga hardware, a feat with which I'm still impressed to this day. I also became very involved with the Amiga community, participating in various computer fests demoing the mighty Amiga's capabilities and serving as a president of the local Amiga users group for a couple of years.
These days, while Linux is my primary computing platform, I still have the A3000, and boot it up every once in a while for nostalgia purposes. It's current form features the MC68040 accelerator, CyberVision graphics card, and maxed out RAM. Maybe someday, another machine will come along that inspires like the Amiga did, but I'm not holding my breath.
I just moved from a Handspring Visor Edge to a Sony Ericsson P800 a week ago, and I love it.
I'd love to get one of these to upgrade from my lovely T68i, but they're virtually impossible to find here in the U.S. There are a lot of them on eBay, but they seem to go for $650 to $700, and while they claim to be unlocked, it leave me wondering if they were hacked by the seller, or if they are truely unlocked from the factory. I don't want a hacked phone of questionable origin.
Otherwise, the phone appears to do everything that I'd use a PDA for, and it's a tri-band GSM phone that will work pretty much everywhere. If I could find one for around $500, I'd be all over it.
..to me, what's the use? to avoid missing the emails that were false positives, you have to go through the rejected mails, so you see the spam anyway, may as well have it in my inbox, saves me switching folders. or am i missing something here?
Here's what you're missing... SpamAssassin tagged emails go into my/usr/local/spam directory, instead of my inbox. Consequently, my new mail notification doesn't even go off, and I'm not bothered by all that crap that is being sent to me. Once a week, I go to that directory, and run the following:
grep From: * | grep -v points
If I don't recognize any of the From: addresses, I simply nuke everything, and the problem is gone. This is a little different from going through the rejected emails and I still get the benefits of spam filtration. In case I do find the rare false-positive, I add that address to my whitelist, and the problem never happens again. I've been using SpamAssassin for about year and half now, and using this technique, I'm now up to over 99% accuracy.
...that was interesting. But after years of experimentation, I'm still holding onto my theory that the primary cause of hiccups originates from the Guinness brewery.;-)
Presumably both the standalone HD TiVo will handle OTA reception of HD locals, but lots of folks don't look at "old fashoned" antennas too kindly. Not to mention all the markets that don't have OTA HD yet.
You don't have to necessarily have a big ugly lightning rod on your roof... I use a nice amplified Terk TV-50 antenna in my attic, and receive all high definition chanels here in Dallas area without a problem. (using a Toshiba HDTV tuner)
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Amen to that. All these Apple fanboys don't realize that they're actually Apple's worst enemy... their endless and often misguided evangelism of Apple's products probably turns more people off Apple than anything else. No doubt that Apple has some innovative products, but they most certainly do not have a monopoly on innovation. Furthermore, Apple also tends suffer from the 'Not Invented Here Syndrome' which often limits the potential of their cool products. Latest example of this boneheaded mentality is their censorship of applications which can be offered through the App Store.
Ummm... W580i doesn't use MicroSD, but rather Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Micro (M2). Those are always going to be significantly more expensive than MicroSD, due to lower volume. For example, I just recently picked up three 4GB MicroSD cards from Woot! for $5.99 each.
LOL... sorry, I misread your post... thought you said that Rush were irrelevant, hence my sarcastic reply about their #3 Billboard position this week. Anyway, I agree with you about Poison et. al. "Nothin' but a good time!"
Irrelevant enough to land at #3 on the Billboard charts. Methinks there are many artists that would kill for that kind of irrelevancy.
Needless to say, someone as uninformed as this moron doesn't deserve much credibility, even when reporting on a fluff subject like 'entertainment news.' Then again, one can see why they would have him cover the red carpet instead of real news.
I also know the email is most likely legit because it was sent to a very specific email address that only Vonage knows and uses (I create a new email alias for each company I deal with. That way I can delete that email address if it gets abused by that company
/. are bordering extreme paranoia.
I do the same thing, and my IPO email also came to my vonage specific email address, and I also received the message in my Vonage voice mail box. All these people on here calling this a phishing scam need to take off their tin foil hat for a minute and take a deep breath. Unquestionably, it's a good thing to be vigilant against email scams, but some of the messages here on
That said, while this IPO offer is legitimate, some of the concerns expressed here about the financial viability are also legitimate. It is very true that Vonage spends disproportionate amounts of money on marketing, even though it is for a very good reason. It's not unlike what amazon.com was doing in their early days... loss-leader sales in order to get their name to be nearly synonymous with online shopping. Today, they're a Fortune 500 company.
There's inherent risk in investing, but the rewards can be well worth it. Do your research and weigh the risks.
That article reads like fodder for conspiracy theorists. It presents four pieces of circumstantial evidence and concludes that based on those, Apple must be planning to switch to Windows. I suppose that could be a plausible scenario in a galaxy far, far away, but in modern, commodity driven computer industry here on Earth, I believe the explanation is far simpler.
Could it be that Apple management is simply being pragmatic, and accepting the fact x86 hardware is cheaper and advancing at faster rate, and that USB 2.0 simply removed any competetive advantage that Firewire might have had in the past, and is present on far more hardware than 1394 is? Naw, it can't be that... it must be that they're planning to dump their most cherished asset, one that sets them apart from the rest of the computer manufacturers, defines the core of Apple's product line, and keeps their customers in fold with nearly religious fervor. Yeah, that must be it!
Comming to a theater near you, Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory II: Electric Boogaloo"
In case you really are curious about this rather than just posing a rhetorical question, I'll answer this. Obviously the feature set won't be identical to iPod, but yes, there are analogous features. Dynamic playlists based on user selected criteria (such as "Entertain Me", "Sounds of 70's/80's/90's/etc...", "Forgotten Gems", "Newest Tracks", etc...), on the fly playlists editable by the user while the player is playing, the player does sync up with my PC automatically (in place of iTunes, there's the Rio Music Manager), and yes, it does use metadata like last played time and play count. It uses that data for the above mentioned playlist functionalities. Obviously, AAC is not supported, as I'm not aware of any other player on the market besides the iPod that actually does support that format. (There may well be, I'm just not aware of one.)
The gaps annoy me enough that I've been searching for a replacement. I have no loyalty to Apple, but I won't give up the rest of the excellent experience.Gapless playback was the other absolute must-have for me, and the main reason why I went with the Karma. Once I got the player, I quickly learned that it's no slouch when it comes to track management, thanks to the features I mentioned above. Now, I'm not saying that the Karma is perfect, but it's pretty darn excellent. Probably the main flaw is the rather flakey Hitachi hard drive which tends to lock up when the player is shaken too hard, requiring the press of the hard reset button. This has been the number 1 complaint about the player, and the main reason why many online stores had some negative feedback for the player. My own experience has been that if I don't go jogging with it, it's perfectly solid. I use it at the office quite a bit, and I've taken the player with me everywhere I travel, and haven't had many problems in the year and a half that I've owned it. The 14 hour battery life is pretty nice as well.
Most of this discussion is somewhat moot at this point anyway, because the Karma has been discontinued, even though it's still available through some retailers. I've been quite dismayed at the fact that there is still no replacement that matches the feature set of this player currently on the market. I'd really like to upgrade to something that can do everything that the Karma can, but has higher storage capacity, is a bit more rugged, and perhaps has a nicer display (i.e. color). I'm hopeful that such a player will be coming in not too distant future, because the engineering team that developed the Karma firmare now works for SigmaTel, and a message posted on www.dapreview.net suggests that they have already implemented the full Karma functionality in the reference design for their new chipset.
Hmmm.... I suppose that because you don't care, you think that everyone else feels the same way. I for one agree with the previous poster about the Vorbis support. It's the number one reason why I opted for a different audio player (Rio Karma in my case) than the iPod.
I would have gladly purchased Apple's player, if it would play my music library. I went through the process of encoding over 5,000 tracks from my CD library, and they're all in OGG/Vorbis, and they play fine on my Windows XP notebook, my MythTV HTPC, my Rio Karma, my Linux server, but they do NOT play on the Apple iPod. You may make yourself feel better about the iPod limitations by dismissing this 'obscure format' as you put it, but that doesn't change the fact that Apple's player doesn't support it, and other, more functional players do.
So, you see, there are people out here that DO care. Really. There are. I'm one of them, and gave my $300 to a different company that delivered a product that delivers much better functionality for my needs.
p.s. Do you have any live albums on your iPod? How do you like those gaps of silence between each track? ;-)
Nope. Only Fox and ABC use the 720p format natively. NBC, CBS, PBS, WB, UPN all use 1080i. Dish Network and DirecTV also utilize 1080i, but that doesn't matter in context of MythTV anyway, since there aren't any (legitimate*) satellite cards for receiving sat programming on computers. Incidentally, our local ABC affiliate WFAA in Dallas/Fort Worth upconverts their 720p network programs and broadcasts 1080i, leaving the Fox station as the only one in our broadcast area that actually uses 720p.
;-) )
By the way, what you heard about signal degradation reducing DishNet 1080i quality to lower resolution doesn't make much sense. It's 1920x1080 interlaced MPEG digital video stream so it either will have full resolution or you won't have any picture at all. Now, Echostar may be applying some filters to the video before they uplink it, but there certainly won't be any quality lost beyond that as a consequence of signal degradation, and the bitstream will still be full 1080i resolution.
Anyway, one thing I know for sure is that my HD package from DishNet looks very good. (especially Monday nights on HDNet.
* - It is possible to receive Dish Network with appropriately configured DVB-S card and smart card emulator, but that puts any US citizen in violation of the DMCA.
If you actually want to have high fidelity reproduction of sound in rooms other than the one that houses your audio system, your only real choice is to run cable. There are some wireless speaker rigs that operate at 900MHz or 2.4GHz, but by the very nature of their design, they are very band limited, and have an onboard amplifier that always has an absolutely horrible harmonic distortion rating (I've seen it as bad as 10% THD). Another words, they sound like crap. If your house is being built, then I would suggest (as others have here) to go buy a spool of speaker cable (and no, it doesn't have to be Monster Cable, any decent copper conductor will do), and run some additional speaker lines in the walls. Even if you don't use them initially, they'll be there when you need them. This is what I did when I had my house built a couple of years ago, and my only regret is that I didn't run even more cable.
Wireless is great for digital data transmission, but not for hifi audio.
What you state is all true, however the player's integrated headphone amp also affects the sound quality, at least for playback through headphones.
I've read plenty of anecdotal evidence on the various internet message boards suggesting that the Karma indeed does sound better than an iPod when compared side by side, using a same audio file and same set of headphones. Personally, I attributed this perceived difference to the quality of the phone amp in each unit. It's entirely possible that the Karma amp drives the phones with a bit more power, which would tend to make the sound more dynamic.
Well, since you asked, it's not a violation because the first amendment protects individual rights, not rights of organizations. Organizations don't have the right to vote, citizens do. There is plenty of civil liberty encroachments to be angry about that our government has passed in the recent years, but the McCain-Feingold bill is not one of them. In fact, it's sole purpose is to try to limit the influence of special interest groups and PAC's on the outcome of our elections, which is a very honorable thing to do, IMHO.
'cept that Matt didn't really have much (anything?) to do with ixemul.library (if my memory serves me correctly). I believe it was Markus Wild, the same guy who later single-handedly ported NetBSD to the Amiga.
On the other hand, Matt wrote the most excellent DICE C compiler, which I purchased from him back in the day, and own it to this day. Overall, I think it was a better development environment that the ol' SAS C that CBM standardized on. The price was also much better for a starving college student that I was.
Not that any of this has anything to do with DragonFly BSD, however as an old Amigan myself, I can unequivocally state that Matt was definately considered an uber-hacker in the community. DNet anyone?
Behold my felow Commie brethren! The chicken lips live! Err, sorry, I know this post doesn't have anything substantial to say, but as someone who cut their teeth in the world of computing through the ranks of VIC-20, C64, Amiga 500, and finally Amiga 3000 users, it gave me warm fuzzies seeing the ol' Commodore logo on a product once again. Having been a die-hard Amiga enthusiast (read: fanatic) and hating the original company's aptitude for clutching defeat out of the jaws of victory, it's nonethess nice to see the name resurrected, even if it has nothing to do with the original ]()()L machines of the 80's and early 90's. (hmmm, wonder if the new mp3 players support custom Copper lists!?)
You know, some of us Americans are using P900's as well. I sure love mine. ;-) The mobile phone sophistication gap that used to exist between Europe and the US has largely been removed in the past couple of years, since GSM has become very wide spread standard on this side of the Atlantic. This has been driven largely by the fact that mobile providers who used to be TDMA based have switched over to GSM.
Kudos to Rio for making a player you are happy with, but in general these companies are going to go for money and widespread adoption, and that probably means embracing the proprietary codecs.
Your point is well taken, but there's no reason why they couldn't support proprietary and open standards. The Rio player supports the DRM laden WMA format as well as MP3 and the lossless, free FLAC in addition to Ogg Vorbis. I think that is a successful formula, and it will sell them a few more players, because people who care about this kind of stuff will specifically seek out the hardware that supports the alternative codecs.
This would be interesting to me if it supported Ogg/Vorbis/Theora. I just bought the fantastic Rio Karma digital music player, and I chose it over the other offerings, specifically because it supports Ogg Vorbis. I'm in the process of encoding my entire CD collection in this format, for both quality and philosophical reasons.
Besides the Rio, there are two other HD based players that support Ogg/Vorbis, the iRiver H120 and the Neuros but I went with the Karma mostly because it's the smallest of the three, the price was right, and the sound is excellent.
USSR spelled it CCCP
....which, of course, transcoded back from cyrilic alphabet spells SSSR, as in "Soyuz Sovietkieh Sosialistiskieh Respubliks* " meaning Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But why does that matter anyway. :-)
* - err, it's kind of difficult to phoniticize russian language in english
"Just let me know,
if you wanna go,
to that home out on the range...
(uh, you know what I'm talkin' about!)"
- Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard describe the L0 lagrangian point
Oh yeah! This discussion brings back memories. I was also one of the die-hard Commodore computer geeks. Started out with a VIC-20 and its incredible 22 column display. I even had a 24K memory expander for that bad boy, which made it much more useful, but also incompatible with many VIC programs due to where the added memory mapped itself.
Then I graduated to the Commodore 64 and its 40 column display and all that memory really opened up the possibilities! Only problem was that damn cassette tape drive. It was painful waiting for Telengard to load up from a tape. Eventually, I upgraded to the 1541 floppy drive, and things got really 'fast.' (Anyone who ever had the 1541 will see the irony in that!) It's a good thing Fast Hack'em came along! C= 64 was also when I got my first modem, a blazing fast 300 baud monster called the Vicmodem, and I proceeded to become a BBS addict. From the Vicmodem I upgraded to a real autodial, but still 300 baud modem, and then finally a 1200 baud screamer.
Then toward the end of the 80's, by which time I'd already become a Unix geek thanks to Explorers post at the local AT&T manufacturing plant, I outgrew the trusty 64, and borrowed money to get an Amiga 500 system. Anyone who ever owned one of those machines will understand what kind of feeling of superiority it invoked in its owners, and at the time, those feelings were justified. Here was a machine with a super efficient Unix-like operating system featuring true pre-emptive multistasking, 4 channel digital audio, 4096 colors, hardware asssisted graphics rendering including a very first blitter in any computer. That machine just killed anything else on ther market from a technical standpoint. The A500 served me well for a couple of years, however once I got it expanded beyond all reasonable bounds, it became clear that it was time to graduate to the big leagues. Once again, I borrowed a large chunk of change (for a junior in college), and I upgraded to the Amiga 3000/25. This box was once again revolutionary, in that it was the first ever fully 32 bit personal computer to hit the market. I think I still have the Byte magazine issue, where they featured it on the cover. The A3000 finally allowed me to run Unix at home, thanks to the efforts of Markus Wild from Switzerland, who singlehandedly ported NetBSD to the Amiga hardware, a feat with which I'm still impressed to this day. I also became very involved with the Amiga community, participating in various computer fests demoing the mighty Amiga's capabilities and serving as a president of the local Amiga users group for a couple of years.
These days, while Linux is my primary computing platform, I still have the A3000, and boot it up every once in a while for nostalgia purposes. It's current form features the MC68040 accelerator, CyberVision graphics card, and maxed out RAM. Maybe someday, another machine will come along that inspires like the Amiga did, but I'm not holding my breath.
I just moved from a Handspring Visor Edge to a Sony Ericsson P800 a week ago, and I love it.
I'd love to get one of these to upgrade from my lovely T68i, but they're virtually impossible to find here in the U.S. There are a lot of them on eBay, but they seem to go for $650 to $700, and while they claim to be unlocked, it leave me wondering if they were hacked by the seller, or if they are truely unlocked from the factory. I don't want a hacked phone of questionable origin.
Otherwise, the phone appears to do everything that I'd use a PDA for, and it's a tri-band GSM phone that will work pretty much everywhere. If I could find one for around $500, I'd be all over it.
Here's what you're missing... SpamAssassin tagged emails go into my /usr/local/spam directory, instead of my inbox. Consequently, my new mail notification doesn't even go off, and I'm not bothered by all that crap that is being sent to me. Once a week, I go to that directory, and run the following:
grep From: * | grep -v points
If I don't recognize any of the From: addresses, I simply nuke everything, and the problem is gone. This is a little different from going through the rejected emails and I still get the benefits of spam filtration. In case I do find the rare false-positive, I add that address to my whitelist, and the problem never happens again. I've been using SpamAssassin for about year and half now, and using this technique, I'm now up to over 99% accuracy.
...that was interesting. But after years of experimentation, I'm still holding onto my theory that the primary cause of hiccups originates from the Guinness brewery. ;-)
Presumably both the standalone HD TiVo will handle OTA reception of HD locals, but lots of folks don't look at "old fashoned" antennas too kindly. Not to mention all the markets that don't have OTA HD yet.
You don't have to necessarily have a big ugly lightning rod on your roof... I use a nice amplified Terk TV-50 antenna in my attic, and receive all high definition chanels here in Dallas area without a problem. (using a Toshiba HDTV tuner)